I remarked,
"With the woeful state of public health care in the US, do people turn to "faith healing" cults out of fear that they will not be able to obtain proper health care through the system when they need it?"
I also suggested that the girls' parents' unwillingness to treat their daughter's illness as an ordinary human disease, their insistence that it was a "spiritual" issue, suggested that they didn't really grasp the idea of the incarnation. That is, they didn't fully recognise that God has come among us in the person of the human being, Jesus Christ. Theirs is an inhuman faith, as evidenced by the cruel death of the little girl.
It was reported today that the family was not linked with any denomination. It seems that they practised a private household religion. They called themselves "Full Gospel" Christians, but didn't belong anywhere.
Reading this, I am more than ever convinced that the parents followed a deviant form of Christianity. Their isolation is what you would suspect of people who have little concept of the value of others.
The great 18th Century evangelist and revivalist, John Wesley, remarked, "The Bible knows nothing of the solitary Christian." He is right. We need each other, and people who withdraw to their own house, cut off from others, directly contravene the saying of 1 John 4: 20,
...anyone who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen.
Imagine if those parents had belonged to a properly functioning congregation. Imagine if there had been people around to comment on the little girl's illness before it got so serious. Imagine if someone had noticed that there was a problem in relationships and perhaps helped them resolve it and not let it get all messed up with the little girl's illness. Even a limited community is better than nothing.
A faulty theology is always intimately connected with a faulty understanding of human beings.
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